Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Turkey’s Creeping Authoritarianism: Is the Resistance Enough?
Stephen Zunes
Friday, May 13, 2016
The Progressive
Turkey’s march towards authoritarianism took another dangerous
turn this past week with the forced resignation of moderate Islamist Prime
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, apparently at the insistence of President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan.
Though constitutionally the Turkish prime minister wields
executive authority and the president is largely a figurehead, Erdoğan—who
served as prime minister for eleven years before term limits forced him to step
down in 2014—appears to still be in charge.
And he is becoming ever more autocratic.
With his Justice and Development Party (AKP) controlling a sizable
majority in parliament, Erdoğan has been steadily increasing his grip on power,
with police raids on opposition media, the jailing of independent journalists
on trumped-up charges, severe repression in Kurdish-populated areas and arrests
of even moderate non-violent Kurdish leaders for alleged terrorist ties, the
undermining of the independent judiciary, and the arrests of political opponents.
Though often portrayed as a struggle between autocratic Islamists
and democratic secularists, the situation in Turkey is not that simple. The
secular nationalist governments which ruled the Turkish Republic for most of
its first eight decades were either semi-autocratic center-right plutocracies
or rightwing military dictatorships, with those subsequent to World War II
maintaining close strategic ties with the United States.
The election of Erdoğan and the AKP in 2003 was initially welcomed
by some pro-democracy elements as a means of weakening the military’s
overbearing influence, breaking up the old corrupt oligarchic order, and
challenging U.S. hegemony. However, the AKP has proved itself to be at least as
corrupt, oligarchical, deferential to the wealthy and powerful economic
interests as the secular elites they replaced. Erdoğan’s social conservatism
and Islamist rhetoric has alarmed both Western nations and educated secular
Turks.
In addition, Erdoğan has cultivated a kind of cult of personality not seen in a
Turkish leader since the days of founding President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Indeed, rather than resembling Iran of the ayatollahs as some initially feared,
it is instead looking increasingly like the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
Just as the United States and European governments tolerated
previous military dictatorships on the grounds that Turkey was a valuable NATO
ally in the struggle against Communism, however, Western leaders have similarly
demonstrated little inclination to challenge Erdoğan’s repression given his
perceived role as an ally in the struggle against Islamist extremism.
Not that taking him on would be easy.
Erdoğan remains genuinely popular. In a manner comparable to
conservative Republican leaders in the United States, he has taken advantage of
the resentment of religious Turks in rural areas and poor working class
communities, winning their allegiance by portraying himself as their ally
against liberal secular urban elites, despite the fact that the AKP’s economic
policies primarily benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor majority.
This cultural divide has been exacerbated by the
often-condescending views towards AKP supporters held by educated Europeanized
liberals of the country’s western cities. Many of these urbanites express
nostalgia for former governments led by long-discredited corrupt secular
nationalist politicians or military rulers. This has made the development of an
electoral majority that can successfully challenge the AKP’s growing power
extremely difficult.
The good news is that this has not stopped the people of Turkey
from fighting back.
Civil society movements, stressing democracy and economic justice,
are growing and becoming better organized. In 2013, the violent breakup of a
nonviolent sit-in in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park protesting a planned urban
development project in one of the city’s few remaining downtown green spaces
spawned a mass movement demanding greater democracy, government transparency,
and economic justice. Over the next several weeks, over three and a half
million Turks took to the streets in more than 5,000 demonstrations across the
country.
As with the Occupy! movement in the United States, the protesters
were unable to sustain their momentum, but it has helped spawn important
grassroots initiatives and curtailed the state’s efforts at consolidating power
still further. Organized labor, feminists, environmentalists, civil
libertarians, and anti-war activists have become increasingly bold in
challenging government policies, as have those fighting government corruption,
economic injustice, and suppression of Kurdish rights.
And just as Turkey has produced elite autocratic secularists, it
has also developed progressive democratic Islamists. A group known as
Antikapitalist Müslümanlar (Anti-Capitalist Muslims) has played an important
role in the popular opposition, challenging the corruption, arrogance, social
conservatism, and crony capitalism of the new Islamic bourgeoisie nurtured by
the AKP, and instead stressing Islam’s message of social justice, respect for
the environment, and honest governance.
Antikapitalist Müslümanlar have organized a series of campaigns
and creative public protests challenging the AKP’s claims of representing
religious Turks.
During Ramadan, when the ruling party hosted an ostentatious
iftar (the evening meal breaking the daylong fast) for the party’s wealthy
supporters in Taksim Square, they put together a simple “people’s iftar” for
thousands sitting on the pavement in a nearby pedestrian mall.
Whether such mobilizations of pro-democracy forces, both Islamic
and secular, can coalesce into a large enough force to prevent Erdoğan from
establishing a full-fledged dictatorship remains to be seen. The forces of
reaction are gaining strength in Turkey, but so is the democratic resistance.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle
Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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